About a third of the way through Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Depressing as hell, but wow, does it draw the reader in. The narrative voice is just about perfect. So far, so outstanding.
Finished The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure Our Lives, Behavior, and Well-Being, by Lily Bernheimer, which isn’t bad, but I’ve read almost everything it covers in various other sources. Also, the author says that “massive animals” like “T-Rexes and mastodons” were killed by an asteroid. Dinosaurs, yes, mastodons, not so much.
Now I’m reading a story collection called Untouched by Human Hands, by Robert Scheckley.
Wiki has a decent article on the Business Plot - Wikipedia
Demon Copperhead co-won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year. Only time that’s ever happened!
Love that one. And all of Sheckley’s early short stories. He got weirder as he got older, though.
Finished Untouched by Human Hands, by Robert Scheckley, of which my favorite was the title story. It was originally published as “One Man’s Poison”, which fits the plot better.
Now I’m reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears), by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.
On audio, I finished Rumpole Misbehaves read by Bill Wallis and have moved on to Rumpole and the Primrose Path, also read by Bill Wallis (although sold by a different audiobook company). I’ve had to revise my estimation of Wallis upwards. He really is a good interpreter of the books, and provides quite a bit of variation in the voices of the different characters. If we can’t have Leo McKern any more, Wallis is a goof substitute.
Speaking of doing different voices, I was impressed when I first heard James Doohan reading a Star Trek audiobook. He does an impressive job of interpreting the voices of the other characters. His Kirk and Spock and McCoy and Sulu really do give you a sense of Shatner, Nimoy, Kelly, and Takei performing.
I’m already close to the end of Rumpole. I’ll have to go to another library and see if I can find one of the Cussler or Preston/Childs novels I haven’t heard yet. (I’ve had a lot of Stephen King lately).
Hope you like it more than I did. As I posted in the May 2021 Whatcha Reading thread, the author “wants to be cleverer than he is. It’s about a libertarian takeover of a small New Hampshire town which pretty much makes everything there crappier. Interesting topic but a disappointing book.”
A typo, I presume?
New thread: It’s here finally!